Read Serpent's Kiss: A Witches of East End Novel Online
Authors: Melissa de la Cruz
Serpent's Kiss: A Witches of East End Novel (9 page)
Girls
was the obvious answer. He didn’t need any magic to hook up other than his lovely smile. When Freddie Beauchamp smiled, all a girl wanted to do was kiss him. After that, they tended to leave presents, like the Wii console, the video games, and the laptop.
It all started with Gigi McIntyre, a college girl he met by the motel’s ice machine, when he first returned. That first night Gigi was there, too, for a friend’s weekend-long bachelorette party in early September. She stood with the empty bucket, wearing a midriff-baring T-shirt and the smallest denim shorts. Gigi was a lot of fun, a glorious revelation after the years of dull nothingness in Limbo.
One might imagine a night with the god of the sun would involve cinematic flourish—the immediate tearing off of clothing as soon as the motel door clicked closed, doing it in every imaginable position, on every surface. No.
Freddie understood that each woman possessed her own distinctive set of rules when it came to sex. Every girl had a different key and Freddie’s gift was knowing how to find it—its particular shape, and how it might turn in the lock. Freddie had unlocked Gigi—
did he ever
—had given the college girl her very first full-body, writhing, shaking, screaming orgasm. But it had taken hours of talking, teasing, conversation. At the ice machine, he’d asked her if she knew how to work the television remote and they’d watched some old movie before he even made a move. It had taken almost all night to get her in bed, but then Freddie had all the time in the world.
Gigi had returned the next day to the Ucky Star in a Porsche convertible filled with boxes and clothes. It all belonged to her brother, she’d explained, who had recently left for his freshman year at NYU. “What does he care? We’re rich. Consider these a welcome gift, Freddie,” she’d said with a toss of her dark mane. “When he gets set up at his apartment in the Village, my mom will just buy him all new stuff. All this is from last year. Nearly vintage.” He thanked her, and she had smiled sweetly. She was still grateful to him for that orgasm.
Gigi zoomed off to New York City, and there were no more college cuties partying at the motel. Things died down. The motel filled with traveling salesmen, couples having illicit affairs, which Freddie found tawdry and sad. He puttered around the boxes Gigi had left, quickly discovering the Wii console and the laptop. The video games were a fun distraction, but the laptop opened a whole new world, one even bigger than the nine worlds of the known universe. He’d missed so much while he was in Limbo, and he caught up on his favorite subjects: sailing ships and oceans. He discovered a deep and instant love for sports cars.
But these were not as cool as the dating sites, where one could choose a girl as easily as picking from a menu. Freddie put up his profile, using the laptop’s Photo Booth application to take snapshots of himself. His pictures were nothing like the ubiquitous male profile pictures one saw on these sites: bare-chested guy in the bathroom mirror, the reflection of his cell phone’s flash covering most of his face.
No, Freddie used his magic to create more appealing scenarios: Freddie in a tuxedo, laughing it up at a cocktail party; Freddie in a cowboy hat on a bull (he’d morphed Buster for that one); Freddie in a gray suit and slightly loosened gray polka-dot tie, looking serious. The kicker was the casual one: Freddie on the beach in a plain T-shirt, jeans, and black Converse (the caption read “This one’s the real me”).
The girls arrived in droves, so many of them Freddie did not know what to do, and so there were threesomes and moresomes and somemoresomes. He indulged every whim, courted every girl, made each and every one of them feel special. There were no unsatisfied customers.
His latest obsession was one Hilly Liman. They had been chatting online for a while now, and it was becoming more intense, messaging each other back and forth in the evenings until it was almost morning. For the last few days, the communiqués had become so frequent and impassioned that Freddie had been forced to call off the cavalry of coeds. He had no interest in any of them since meeting Hilly.
Something formidable had happened: Freddie had fallen in love. There was no other way to explain it. Hilly was different. She made him wait. Unlike the other girls who appeared at his doorstep after one posting, she had only told him her real name after they’d been e-mailing for a few weeks. She was reserved and cautious, and he didn’t think she was playing hard to get. The strangest thing was she didn’t even have a picture of herself on her profile, only a shadowy illustration of a silhouette. He didn’t even know what she looked like, but he was certain she was gorgeous. He could just feel it. He couldn’t explain it, but he was drawn to her from the beginning.
<
<
<>
he wrote.
<
<>
Freddie paused, staring at Hilly’s words on the screen, putting his hands behind his head as he stretched his back, which was sore from sitting. He exhaled, then typed
<
Three knocks sounded at the door. Freya’s signal.
<
<
<>
he typed and on-screen, in the chat box, Freddie’s heart icon turned red, then swiveled upright, and Hilly typed one out for Freddie on her end, and he watched it do the same thing, smiling to himself. You had to love technology.
Buster nudged his calf as Freya continued to knock.
“Freddie, you there?” she whispered from outside.
“Coming!” He closed the laptop and opened the door a crack.
Freya stood at the doorway, looking wind tossed and holding two shopping bags full of groceries. She stared at him. “Are those … pajamas? Have you been wearing them all day?” Behind her, the sky was gray, and it was almost evening.
“So?” Freddie asked, annoyed with the sisterly nagging. “It’s not like I go anywhere.”
“But that’s your fault. I’ve told you so many times to come home.” She shook her head. “Well, aren’t you going to let me in? I brought you healthy stuff from Mom’s garden, some nuts and dried fruit, instead of all that junk food you’ve been eating.”
Freddie took the bags from her, poked his head outside, looked each way, and then fully opened the door. Freya walked in past him. “You seem distracted,” she said.
“A little,” he said. He put the bags down as she crossed the room and sat at the end of one of the beds. “Some of those girls won’t leave me alone. I wanted to make sure none of them was out there.”
Buster scuffled over to Freya, and she kneeled down and pet him, then tickled his snout. “I thought you liked all the attention. Don’t tell me you’re here alone. What happened to the harem?” She observed him with genuine concern and wondered if her twin had truly lost it. He looked a real mess: tousled hair, dirty pajamas, unshaven. He shouldn’t be living this way. She looked around and noticed the computer on his desk.
“Ooh, you have a Mac!” she said, sauntering over to inspect it.
“Don’t touch it!”
“It’s not a bomb!” “It kind of is,” he retorted. He moved the grocery bags on the desk, put a hand on the laptop protectively.
“You’re acting so weird,” she said, squinting her eyes at him. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”
“All right.” He sighed. He realized he was dying to tell Freya, so it all gushed out: the social media sites and how he’d met someone special—a girl named Hilly Liman. After that he couldn’t say her name enough times.
As Freya listened, she finally understood how Freddie had kept his loneliness at bay. He’d obviously gone delusional. She was reluctant to burst his bubble about this Hilly girl, who was probably just some slutty college chick, not that there was any other kind, and not that there was anything wrong with that. Freya, of all people, understood the need to experiment, the desire to see just exactly how much fun one could have when one was beautiful and young.
However, this whole Freddie-in-love thing was too much. She’d grown weary of his whole situation—the motel, the accusations, the sloth.
Freddie sat on the armchair, legs extended. “She’s the one, Freya. I’m telling you. It’s for real this time.” He smiled.
“Yeah, right. Every week you fall for someone new, and you haven’t even met this …”
“Hilly Liman.”
“Yeah. I should really know her name by now. You say it enough.” Freya pushed a hand through her hair. “Look, I’m tired, and I can’t do this. I can’t find that thing you’re convinced Killian stole from you, that will prove he did it, and we really need to move on. I’m going to let the family know you’re back. Mother will be so happy!”
Freddie jumped from his seat, his face flushed. “You can’t do that, Freya. No one can know! If the Valkyries know where I am … they’ll … they’ll drag me back. I can’t go back to Limbo! You don’t know what it’s like there! I need to prove I wasn’t the one who destroyed the bridge!” Freddie made a frustrated gesture, then fell back into the armchair, deflated. His head fell. When he looked back up at her, tears welled in his eyes. “I can’t go back. You have to help me, Freya. Please.” His voice broke.
Freya shook her head, staring ruefully at her twin. “Oh, Freddie, stop,” she said. But her voice was cracking, too.
The Gang’s All Here
A shaft of light poured through the attic gable, illuminating particles of dust. On the floor, leading through the sundry pieces of furniture, was a Hansel and Gretel–like trail of candy wrappers, paper clips, glitter, DayGlo-colored mini Post-its, and childhood costumes.
Ingrid had come up to search for a book she couldn’t find in Joanna’s study. She glared at the odd trail. When she had last set foot here after returning from Freya’s Manhattan apartment, she had placed those costumes back in the box and set it upright. Tyler couldn’t have done it because Gracella had yet to return after the other day. Was it Freya maybe? Her sister was certainly the messiest of them, but what would she be doing digging through old costumes? Ingrid set about straightening up, picking up a pink tutu here, a plastic glass slipper there, a black leather mask—hmm, that didn’t look like a child’s costume but like something from Freya’s closet—and when she arrived at the end of the trail, she was standing before Joanna’s large steamer trunk. Was that really cigarette smoke? She sniffed at the air.
She hovered over the trunk and noticed the latches were undone. When she lifted the top, she stared down at five small heads tucked between five pairs of grungy knees. The heads looked up, and she immediately recognized the pixies. They had glitter all over their dirty faces: three boys and two girls.
Well, it wouldn’t be accurate to say they were children, although Ingrid thought of them as such. They were adult in years but had childlike bodies and childlike minds, as well as mischievous spirits. With their blackened faces, they reminded her of the chimney sweeps of Victorian England, although they were quite the opposite of those poor abused children who had the maturity and jaded attitudes of adults, drinking ale, smoking pipes, and shooting the breeze at the inn after work. The pixies
had
taken to cheap booze and smoking in mid-world—that much Ingrid had observed at the motel where she’d first met them—but there was something rather naïve about these creatures.
“Well, look what we have here,” she said, thinking she sounded a bit like Hudson right then.
“Don’t hate on us, Erda!” said Kelda with her tiny rosebud lips. She lifted a hand in a ragged fingerless glove to protect her face as if Ingrid might smack her.
“I see you’ve picked up the local slang. Isn’t that just fantastic!” returned Ingrid as all five of the pixies sheepishly rose and stepped out of the trunk.
The clever ones
, Tyler had called them. Clever boy.
Their clothes were an array of grimy hues, from dark army olive to black: skinny jeans, ripped T-shirts, frayed sweaters, safety pins, wool caps, and heavy black boots. Ingrid could not have determined what kind of look they were aiming for—punk, grunge, grebo, or crusty. All those rebellious styles looked the same to her no matter the decade; only the year and the label changed. The pixies looked as if they had just returned from war, and they had grown quite odiferous since the last time she’d seen them.